which,
in the absence of any authoritative judicial
pronouncement, a tolerant or a credulous people
is exposed. With the passage of time the former
tend to discount, perhaps because of their very
horror, the stories of aggression and atrocity
that may be handed down; and the latter, the
credulous, misled by perhaps fanatical and
perhaps dishonest propagandists, come to believe
that it was not they but their opponents who
were guilty of that which they would themselves
condemn. And so we believe that this Tribunal,
acting, as we know it will act notwithstanding
its appointment by the victorious powers, with
complete and judicial objectivity, will provide
a contemporary touchstone and an authoritative
and impartial record to which future historians
may turn for truth, and future politicians for
warning. From this record shall future
generations know not only what our generation
suffered, but also that our suffering was the
result of crimes, crimes against the laws of
peoples which the peoples of the world upheld
and will continue in the future to uphold 
to uphold by international co-operation, not
based merely on military alliances, but
grounded, and firmly grounded, in the rule of
law.

Nor, though this procedure and
this Indictment of individuals may be novel, is
there anything new in the principles which by
this prosecution we seek to enforce. Ineffective
though, alas, the sanctions proved and showed to
be, the nations of the world had, as it will be
my purpose in addressing the Tribunal to show,
sought to make aggressive war an international
crime, and although previous tradition has
sought to punish states rather than individuals,
it is both logical and right that, if the act of
waging war is itself an offense against
international law, those individuals who shared
personal responsibility for bringing such wars
about should answer personally for the course
into which they led their states. Again,
individual war crimes have long been recognized
by international law as triable by the courts of
those states whose nationals have been outraged,
at least so long as a state of war persists. It
would be illogical in the extreme if those who,
although they may not with their own hands have
committed individual crimes, were responsible
for systematic breaches of the laws of war
affecting the nationals of many states should
escape for that reason. So also in regard to
Crimes against Humanity. The rights of
humanitarian intervention on behalf of the
rights of man, trampled upon by a state in a
manner shocking the sense of mankind, has long
been considered to form part of the recognized
law of nations. Here too, the Charter merely
develops a pre-existing principle. If murder,
rapine, and robbery are indictable under the
ordinary municipal laws of our countries, shall
those who differ from the common criminal only
by the extent and systematic nature of their
offenses escape accusation?